I finally was able to make my first contacts. Saturday was a contest day, and this meant that there were plenty of HAMs looking for contacts. I worked the 40 meter band for about half an hour and made three contacts.
My antenna is simply a 1:1 balun hooked to an 80 foot long piece of wire that runs out the window and through the trees, and the other side of the balun is hooked to the downspout of the gutter. I made contacts with this in Miami, Bradenton, and New Orleans. I will take what I can get for now.
On the down side, the tuning dial on my rig has a bad encoder after only a week. I bought it at AES, I called them, and they said that I could return it for another.
1 comment:
Do you know any hams locally? Someone might have an antenna analyzer that can tell you if your G5RV has any problems. The MFJ 259 is serviceable; there's a handful of different antenna analyzers on the market with varying degrees of accuracy. They can tell you what sort of issues you might have.
As you can tell, the 80 foot end-fed wire can work fine. I assume you're using a tuner of some sort, which will help. End fed wires become really high impedance when they're a half wave long (468/f in MHz gives 1/2 wave in feet) A half wave at 40m is about 66' so being longer is probably helping you load it. On 80 meters 66' is quarter wave, so your 80' is shorter and should work fine, too. Assuming you can load it.
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